Chronic skeletal-muscular pain costs the US $200+B a year and increasing in terms of loss of time and medical expenses according to the 2011 CDC report. However, they are merely the manifestation of the underlying causes—skeletal-muscular injuries or pinched nerves.
Skeletal-muscular injuries from car accidents, sports, exercises, sudden movement, wrong postures or sometime unknown reasons are the major cause of such pain. Standard self-care process includes cold/heat pads and good rest for a period of time. In many cases, especially in acute cases, the body recovers; the muscle injury heals, and the pain disappears. Unfortunately, many people, 112 million in the US, get stuck with chronic pain, according to the CDC report.
Pinched nerves at spinal cord cause pain syndromes or loss of motor control at extremities (arms and legs). When a motor nerve is pinched, the patient experiences weak muscle response or even loss of motor control of the affected arm/leg. When a sensory nerve is pinched, the patient experiences tingling sensation, numbness in certain areas of the affected arm or leg. Herniated discs are often cited as the cause of the problem in radiological interpretation of CT scans. However, it is misleading because (1) most herniated discs do not even touch the nearby nerve and thus not necessarily cause any pain, and (2) herniated discs occur even in normal people with no pain or known injury. Most pinched nerve problems, as our clinical study indicates, are actually caused by injuries of the muscle groups that support and balance the spine. When the injuries of those corresponding muscles, mostly near the neck or the lower back, are healed, the pinched nerve problem and any associated pain disappear as well.
Standard treatments for chronic pain typically include physical therapy, pain medication, epidural injection of steroids, and surgeries. The treatment process is long and ineffective: Majority of the patients had little or no improvement after six months or longer of various therapies. The epidural injection is useful to reduce neural inflammation. However, most of the chronics pains described above are not neural inflammation. Thus, majority of patients either experience no improvement or temporary improvement with a rebound in a few days or few months when the epidural steroid wears off. In addition, due to the serious side-effect of steroids, epidural injection can only be used for several times. The prognosis of surgery was even less positive. Most of patients who undergo such invasive surgeries on and after six-month recovery periods found that their conditions are not better or even worse than before the surgery. Pain medications, including both prescription anti-inflammatory drugs and over-the-counter analgesic medicine, are often used to relieve the pain temporarily and reduce the inflammation hoping that the body will heal the injury itself once inflammation is reduced. For some patients with acute injury, the pain medication will bridge them through the recovery process with less or no pain. Unfortunately, chronic pain patients usually experience temporary relief with medications. The pain returns within hours after medication is taken. In essence, majority of people who have chronic pain would go through multiple years of treatments without a permanent cure.
Based on extensive medical and biological research, when deep (muscle) tissues are injured, it triggers a cascade of the healing process mediated by innate immune system: The injured muscle/soft tissue triggers the release of cytokines (chemicals carry signals to promote or inhibit immune responses), which recruit the innate immune cells (e.g., macrophages) to take away the dead and injured tissue cells. Macrophages in turn release other cytokines (e.g., IGF-1) and trigger the cascade of the muscle tissue repair and regeneration. In normal cases, the immune system eventually heals the muscle. Unfortunately, the process often gets interrupted and never completes. Interruptive processes include:                Scar tissue formation (b-FGF→fibroblast→fibrosis→scars)        Excessive and prolonged inflammation        Sheared muscle (structural damage of the connective tissue/framework)        Age effect        Cycle aborted due to various environmental influencesWhen interrupted, the patient is stuck with the chronic pain and injury.        